I recently installed a second IDE HD (Maxtor 30gig) to my existing system which had a Western Digital 10gig IDE HD in it. The reaseon for the swap was because the WD was receiving a blue screen "Cannot write to drive c:" only when I was browsing on the internet and would need to hit a key to return to the desktop. I've tried Norton Utilites which could not find any problems but when I rebooted the system would find bad clusters/sectors, which I allowed to have cleaned up.Unfortunately, cleaning them did not fix the problem.

Anyway back to my dilema. I have the following scenario:

CR writer - Primary Master
CD rom - Primary slave
Maxtor - Secondary Master
WD - Secondary slave

When I installed the Maxtor I set the jumpers to master and WD to slave. I replaced the original ribbon cable of the WD (which was a 20 pin cable with 2 ide connections) and used the new ribbon cable (which is a 40 pin cable with 3 ide connections). The Maxtor is on the end IDE connector,the WD is in the middle and the other(blue) end is on the mother board on the white IDE connector. I checked my BIOS (Award) settings to make sure that it was set to AUTO. I partitioned the drive into 3 seperate drives ( C,D,E ) which are found after I install the OS (Windows ME).

I cannot see the WD drive, any recommendations, Please help !

Hi,

Sounds like you have the cables hooked up correctly and the jumpers sound correct. However, double check the cables to make sure they are seated securely and that they are not one pin off. That would be unlikely with the type of cable you describe. It sounds like an 80-pin cable to enable ultra DMA transfer rates on the new Maxtor. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Check the cables for secure connection. And, double check the jumpers on the WD.

Have you went into bios and chose 'auto detect harddrive', or something along those lines? It's usually a separate category all by itself, usually on the right-hand side of the first screen that shows all the categories of the bios.

If that doesn't work, then try hooking both HD's to the primary IDE channel, although I am not sure that would make a difference. Might be worth a shot. Enter bios and run the 'auto detect harddrive' feature again.

Other than that, it may be that the old WD is toast, especially considering that you were having a lot of problems with it. Try the above suggestions first. Hang tight and some other people will surely have an opinion or two.

Cheers,

Big Blue 66

If the 10 gig WD is not toast already.....it's so close it would SCARE ya! If you want to be more certain before you throw it in the trash, run FDISK on your drives and see if fdisk even FINDS it....if it doesnt, time to toss it...you could spend forever trying to low level format it and a million other temp fixes to get more life out of it, but once it starts getting a bunch of bad clusters......it's a goner.

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When all else fails...I'm a heck of a parts swapper!